CONTENTdm®

Collection building

Create and organize collections

CONTENTdm supports personal project space and shared projects, and a centralized queue allows for final review or editing by a collection administrator. To support collection building with groups and multiple workflows, CONTENTdm includes tools to allow adding records in batches or singly, to conduct Web-based import, and to add CONTENTdm digital items to existing WorldCat records through the OCLC Connexion client.

Quickly add items and metadata

You can add items to your collection singly or using batch processes and tools that make it easy to add and process thousands of digital items at once. Metadata templates allow you to quickly standardize your descriptive, technical and administrative metadata. You can also import existing metadata into CONTENTdm. Built-in editing tools and controlled vocabularies aid in cataloging; while the software includes ten integrated thesauri from the OCLC Terminologies Service, you can also import or develop your own controlled vocabulary.

Manage complex media types

CONTENTdm can store any file format and can display any file format that can be displayed in your browser either natively or via a plug-in. This includes all common formats, such as JPEG, GIF or TIFF images; WAV or MP3 audio files; AVI or MPEG video files; PDF files and more.

Extend your CONTENTdm website

CONTENTdm has a well-defined query API that allows you to develop custom interfaces to display your collections. With the CONTENTdm API, users currently integrate their collections with Drupal, WordPress, Google Maps, VuFind and shopping carts.

Learn how your collections are used

The built-in usage summary and pageview reports give you insight into how your collections are being used, and integration with Google Analytics enables you to construct more detailed reports to further analyze your collection usage.

End-user experience

Optimize search and view

CONTENTdm includes an interface for discovery and sharing as well as social features for commenting, tagging and rating digital items. You can guide the search experience by configuring which metadata fields to display in the results grid and QuickView. End users can use simple or advanced search and can search all collections, just some or only one.

Browse collections

One-click access to images, documents, audio and video recordings and their associated metadata helps users who are unfamiliar with a collection browse rather than formulate specific searches.

Make image files searchable

You can use the CONTENTdm OCR Extension to generate full-text transcripts from image files. The CONTENTdm OCR Extension uses award-winning ABBYY® FineReader® OCR (optical character recognition) software to capture text to add to searchable metadata fields within CONTENTdm collections. With this feature, end users' search terms are highlighted in the image when viewed. You can add the OCR Extension to any CONTENTdm license.

Save items for reference and presentations

End users can save items and their metadata in the CONTENTdm Favorites for later reference. Favorites can be exported to a Microsoft® PowerPoint® or Zip Archive file for offline use.